cachai? No, no cacho nada!

The fact that I'm sitting in my bedroom on my first Saturday night in Chile makes me a little deprimida. But I can't really complain; I have a bedroom, after all, in a house with a family, and that's far more than I expected to have when I first started planning this whole Chilean expedition. But still...I wish I had the built-in friends of my Spain program here, so I'd have someone with whom I could explore the nightlife and whatnot. Oh well, it'll happen in time.

SO - Chile! Ole! First off, I needn't have worried so much about my Spanish. Cadiz Spanish was so bad that anything else is made better by comparison. It's still difficult because of the slang, but I'm getting better. Even started dropping my s's again.

Today it was beautiful here. It was the first time I'd been outside in the daylight - on Thursday and Friday, I didn't get home from work til after sunset, and didn't get to explore the area. Today I went to buy a pillow (muy necessary) and got to see part of Providencia, which is a pretty broadly defined area in town, as far as I can tell, because my house and my work are both in it but it takes me 40 minutes in the subway to travel between. Oh well.

It was that perfect kind of late-fall day (How weird for it to be late fall in June...) where the light is shining through the brown leaves of the trees, and the sun is warm but the air is crisp, and the sky...well, the sky tries to be blue through the smog.





Work is...work is scary. WHY DID I NOT STUDY ECONOMICS?! My one consolation is that neither my boss nor my mentor studied economics in school, either, and both managed to learn on the fly and land jobs at the best global news organization in the world. Still, though. All I did on Thursday and Friday was read - read Reuters stories, read the local Spanish newspapers - and I still cannot get a handle on the most fundamental aspects of economics. Chile plans to sell a "sovereign bond" and issue "foreign debt" - my completely uneducated question is, Why on earth would anyone want to buy someone else's debt? I have no idea. My dad tried to explain it to me over Skype this afternoon and it still made no sense at all. Because really, I mean...This whole business of international debt - we owe China billions and billions, I know, and someone else owes someone else who owes someone else...It doesn't really mean anything, though. There are no country-sized loan sharks who are going to go in and break the knees of the U.S. if we can't pay it, right? (Maybe there are. I don't want to meet them. I never gamble.) But like...saying we're in debt to one nation or another...it seems so...abstract. Conceptual. Not practical. How do you call in a debt from the country with one of the most powerful militaries in the world? No idea.

So, yeah. That's really stressful. Also stressful: They had someone at the president's speech about his first 100 days in office, holding their cell phone in the air, and then we had the office phone on speaker; I was told to listen in and pick what the most important thing he said was. GAH! No idea!! None whatsoever. I couldn't understand a word he was saying, let alone write it down. Joder.

But everyone's really nice; the secretary calls me "mi nina," and the only other American offered to go to lunch with me and show me around, and we all went out for drinks and dinner last night and they joshed me like one of the gang. So that's helpful, but...I still have no idea about economics.

If I try to write any more now, it's going to be long and boring (that's what she..? no, nvm.) so I'll just stop. Chao chao!

Love always,
molly